Castle Rock doesn’t seem like a very nice place to live. The new trailer for Hulu’s upcoming 10-episode anthology series, based on the small-town multiverse created by Stephen King, puts the blame for the fictional Maine town’s troubles squarely on the town itself. “Everyone’s got a theory about how it started, about Castle Rock’s original sin,” intones Dale Lacy, played by Terry O’Quinn (Lost). “There’s blood in every backyard, inside every house.”
First revealed by Entertainment Weekly, the preview adds very few details about the storyline of the series itself but casts a palpable sense of dread over every scene. There’s someone roaming through the forest with a bloody knife, more than a few dead bodies, and a guy digging up … something in his backyard. Everything is just a little off.
The town first appeared in King’s novel The Dead Zone and has been featured in several of his works since. There are a few obvious nods to King’s canon — Shawshank seems to play at least a supporting role, with a photo of Warden Norton briefly visible, and you might even catch a glimpse of the number 237. Scott Glenn will be a series regular in the role of Alan Pangborn, a retired sheriff who appeared in the novels Needful Things and The Dark Half.
André Holland will star in the series as Henry, a death row attorney with a complex back story. Other cast members include Sissy Spacek (the original Carrie), Melanie Lynskey, and Bill Skarsgård, who played the evil clown Pennywise in the 2017 film adaptation of It.
A previous trailer teased various characters and locations from throughout King’s oeuvre, including Pennywise, Danny Torrance from The Shining, and John Coffee from The Green Mile. According to The Hollywood Reporter, each season will focus on different characters and storylines using King’s novels and short stories as a starting point.
The first three episodes of Castle Rock will premiere on Hulu on July 25. Stephen King and J.J. Abrams are executive producers, and they previously teamed up for 11.23.63, the Hulu adaptation of King’s time-traveling novel about the Kennedy assassination.
“Whenever it began, whoever’s sin we’re paying for, we’re trapped in a cycle that stretches back centuries,” says Dale in the trailer. “People say ‘It wasn’t me — it was this place.’ And the thing is — they’re right.”
